Unexpectedly, the thought of him with another woman, kissing her, touching her, makes tears burn behind my eyelids. I blink rapidly, trying to keep them from falling. Georgie stops hanging small red ornaments on the tree, looking at me concernedly.
“Are you alright?” He frowns. “You look like you’re about to cry.
“I’m just happy to be home,” I tell him firmly, grabbing a box of matching gold ornaments to stagger with the red and green and white glittery ones already hanging from the tree. “Back with you.”
Georgie rolls his eyes predictably, but he seems to buy my excuse. I force myself not to keep thinking about Alexandre with someone else, but the hollow, sick pit in my stomach left from the imagery stays there.
He’s going to spend Christmas alone.But if I’d stayed, Georgie would have been alone, cold, and hungry for Christmas. It hadn’t been a choice, as I’ve told myself over and over again, and even if it had been, the right one was obvious. I had to go home to my brother.
So why do I feel so fucking guilty?
Why do I miss him so fucking much?
I go to bed early, leaving Georgie to stay up playing his video games on the new console I’d bought him for an early Christmas present. Lying there in my bed, I acutely feel the loneliness of it, remembering the warmth of Alexandre next to me.
I feel as if I’m aching for him, even just brushing my fingertips against his, leaning into him as I kiss him, the feeling of his hard, hot body against mine—
Stop it. This isn’t helping.
I haven’t let myself fantasize about him, no matter how much I’ve wanted to. It would hurt too much to remember what we did together, the way it felt. It would be nothing but counterproductive, but that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming about him every night. It’s always the same dreams, his mouth on mine, his body against mine, but in these dreams, it goes so much further. In my dreams, he has the use of his hands, holding me hard against him, rolling me onto my back so he can pin me down and drive himself into me—
But tonight, the dreams are different.
Tonight, when I dream about him, he’s in the kitchen again, sitting in a sea of broken glass, shards of it sticking out of the gashes in his forearms. Blood is pouring from him, so much blood that he shouldn’t be alive, but he’s staring at me with hopeless eyes, his mouth parted in a silent scream—
--until it’s not silent anymore.
Noelle! Noelle, help me, help me—
His guttural cry turns to a low, begging moan. I know going to him is dangerous, but I step forward anyway, wading through the sea of broken glass to go to him, to reach him, but no matter how far I walk, he’s still too far away. I can feel the glass cutting at me, shredding my feet and my skin, and as I walk, red roses sprout up where the blood trail is left behind me, but I hardly notice. I don’t feel the pain or see the blood. All I can think of is getting to him as the blood spreads through the glass, painting scenes of our time together on it, rippling and spreading as he cries out for me, his voice sick and exhausted, but I can’t reach him.
He’s too far.
Alexandre!
I cry out, reaching for him, but it’s no use. The further I walk, the further away it seems he is, until my feet are so shredded from the glass that I fall to my knees, the roses springing up into thorny vines wrapping themselves around me, thorns of glass cutting into my skin, tearing me to ribbons.
The room spins, slinging me violently towards him, and for a moment, I think I’ll be able to reach him after all. But just before my fingertips can touch his, the vines yank me back, slicing into my skin just as I reach out to touch him, feeling the heat coming off of him, the fever burning him up—
I wake with a gasp in the early grey of dawn, not so different from the morning I left him, gasping and sweating. I look down at my arms, half expecting to see them shredded from the glass, but there’s only smooth flesh.
It was just a dream, Noelle.
I tell myself that over and over throughout the day. It was a nightmare, nothing more. It’s not as if I haven’t had them before, many times over. But no matter how many times I repeat it, I can’t feel anything but a sick, nagging sensation that Alexandre needs me. That something is coming for him.
That I need to go back.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve,I tell myself crossly as I make breakfast for Georgie and me, the best I can manage.I can’t go back to Paris. I can’t leave Georgie for Christmas. I told him I wouldn’t leave again.
And then, as I sit there poking at bacon and eggs that I no longer have an appetite for, the answer comes to me.
Just take him with you.
It seems like an easy enough solution—except that I’d told myself I wouldn’t go back. What would be the point? There’s no future for Alexandre and me.
What if there is? What if you could have both?
Leaving him the way I did was supposed to answer all of my questions and give me what I needed to close that chapter for good. But I can’t stop feeling as if it’s been left unfinished despite that.